“Don’t you mean the Faërie?” said Maddy, intrigued.

“Faërie, Fiery, it’s all the same. This rune”-he looked at it closely-“this mark of yours. Do you know what it is?”

“Nat Parson says it’s the devil’s mark.”

“Nat Parson’s a gobshite,” One-Eye said.

Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson gobshite.

“Listen to me, girlie,” he said. “Your man Nat Parson with his foolish Good Book has every reason to fear that mark. Aye, and envy it too.”

Once more he studied the design on Maddy’s palm, with interest and-Maddy thought-some wistfulness. “A curious thing,” he said at last. “I never thought to see it here.”

“But what is it?” said Maddy. “If the Book isn’t true-”

“Oh, there’s truth in the Book,” said One-Eye, and shrugged. “But it’s buried deep under legends and lies. That war, for instance…”

“Tribulation,” said Maddy helpfully.

“Aye, if you like, or Ragnarók. Remember, it’s the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings. If the Æsir had won-”

“The Æsir?”

“Seer-folk, I daresay you’d call ’ em here. Well, if they’d won that war-and it was close, mind you-then the Elder Age would not have ended, and your Good Book would have turned out very different, or maybe never been written at all.”

Maddy’s ears pricked up at once. “The Elder Age? You mean before Tribulation?”

One-Eye laughed. “Aye. If you like. Before that, Order reigned. The Æsir kept it, believe it or not, though there were no Seers among them in those days, and it was the Vanir, from the borders of Chaos-the Faërie, your folk’d call ’em-that were the keepers of the Fire.”

“The Fire?” said Maddy, thinking of her father’s smithy.

“Glam. Glám-sýni, they called it. Rune-caster’s glam. Shape-changer’s magic. The Vanir had it, and the children of Chaos. The Æsir only got it later.”

“How?” said Maddy.

“Trickery-and theft, of course. They stole it and remade the Worlds. And such was the power of the runes that even after the Winter War, the fire lay sleeping underground, as fire may sleep for weeks, months-years. And sometimes even now it rekindles itself-in a living creature, even a child-”

“Me?” said Maddy.

“Much joy may it bring you.” He turned away and, frowning, seemed once more absorbed in his book.

But Maddy had been listening with too much interest to allow One-Eye to stop now. Until then she had heard only fragments of tales-and the scrambled versions from the Book of Tribulation, in which the Seer-folk were mentioned only in warnings against their demonic powers or in an attempt to ridicule those long-dead impostors who called themselves gods.

“So-how do you know these stories?” she said.

The Outlander smiled. “You might say I’m a collector.”

Maddy’s heart beat faster at the thought of a man who might collect tales in the way another might collect penknives, or butterflies, or stones. “Tell me more,” she said eagerly. “Tell me about the Æsir.”

“I said a collector, not a storyteller.”

But Maddy was not to be put off. “What happened to them?” she said. “Did they all die? Did the Nameless hurl them into the Black Fortress, with the snakes and demons?”

“Is that what they say?”

“Nat Parson does.”

He made a sharp sound of contempt. “Some died, some vanished, some fell, some were lost. New gods emerged to suit a new age, and the old ones were forgotten. Maybe that proves they weren’t gods at all.”

“Then what were they?”

“They were the Æsir. What else do you need?”

Once again he turned away, but this time Maddy caught at him. “Tell me more.”

“There is no more,” One-Eye said. “There’s me. There’s you. And there’s our cousins under the Hill. The dregs, girlie, that’s what we are. The wine’s long gone.”

“Cousins,” said Maddy wistfully. “Then you and I must be cousins too.” It was a strangely attractive thought. That Maddy and One-Eye might both belong to the same secret tribe of traveling folk, both of them marked with Faërie fire…

“Oh, teach me how to use it,” she begged, holding out her palm. “I know I can do it. I want to learn-”

But One-Eye had lost patience at last. He snapped his book shut and stood up, shaking the grass stems from his cloak. “I’m no teacher, little girl. Go play with your friends and leave me alone.”

“I have no friends, Outlander,” she said. “Teach me.”

Now, One-Eye had no love for children. He looked down with no affection at all at the grubby little girl with the runemark on her hand and wondered how he could have let her draw him in. He was getting old-wasn’t that the truth?-old and sentimental, and it was likely to be the death of him-aye, as if the runes hadn’t already told him as much. His most recent casting of the runestones had given him Madr, the Folk, crossed with Thuris, the Thorny One, and finally Hagall, the Destroyer-

– and if that wasn’t a warning to keep moving on-

“Teach me,” said the little girl.

“Leave me alone.” He began to walk, long-legged, down the side of the Hill, with Maddy running after him.

“Teach me.”

“I won’t.”

“Teach me.”

“Get lost!”

“Teach me.”

“Ye gods!”

One-Eye made an exasperated sound and forked a runesign with his left hand. Maddy thought she saw something between his fingers-a fleck of blue fire, no more than a spark, as if a ring or gemstone he was wearing had caught the light. But One-Eye wore no rings or gems…

Without thinking, she raised her hand against the spark and pushed it back toward the Outlander with a sound like a firecracker going off.

One-Eye flinched. “Who taught you that?”

“No one did,” said Maddy in surprise. Her runemark felt unusually warm, once more changing color from rusty brown to tiger’s-eye gold.

For a minute or two One-Eye said nothing. He looked at his hand and flexed the fingers, now throbbing as if they had been burned. Then he looked at Maddy with renewed curiosity.

“Teach me,” she said.

There was a long pause. Then he said, “You’d better be good. I haven’t taken a pupil-let alone a girl-in more years than I care to remember.”

Maddy hid her grin beneath her tangled hair.

For the first time in her life, she had a teacher.

4

Over the next fortnight, Maddy listened to One-Eye’s teachings with a single-mindedness she had never shown before. Nat Parson had always made it clear that to be a bad-blood was a shameful thing, like being a cripple or a bastard. But here was this man telling her the exact opposite. She had skills, the Outlander told her, skills that were unique and valuable. She was an apt pupil, and One-Eye, who had come to the valley as a trader of medicines and salves and who rarely stayed anywhere for longer than a few days, this time extended his visit to almost a month as Maddy absorbed tales, maps, letters, cantrips, runes-every scrap of information her new friend gave her. It was the beginning of a long apprenticeship, and one that would change her world picture forever.

Now, Maddy’s folk believed in a universe of Nine Worlds.

Above them was the Firmament, the Sky City of Perfect Order.

Beneath them was the Fundament, or World Below, which led to the three lands of Death, Dream, and Damnation, which gave way to World Beyond, the Pan-daemonium, the home of all Chaos and all things profane.

And between them, so Maddy was taught, lay the Middle Worlds: Inland, Outland, and the One Sea, with Malbry and the valley of the Strond right at the center, like a bull’s-eye on a shooting target. From which you might have concluded that the folk of Malbry had no small opinion of themselves.